Examples:

Skills you unlock in the Devil May Cry series carry over between playthroughs, and it's expected that you'll max out your stats before tackling the harder difficulties.

Clover Studios/Platinum Games seemed to like doing this, as this was also the case with the Viewtiful Joe games and Bayonetta.

The goal (if it can be called such) of Noby Noby Boy is to stretch your BOY to as long as possible. You can then upload your length to GIRL. GIRL's length is the total length of all BOYs submitted, and as GIRL reaches new milestones, new playgrounds are unlocked for all BOYs.

Edutainment Game

Gravestones in The Oregon Trail are potentially shown to future parties going along the trail. These stones could be inscribed by the player allowing for some very interesting messages.

Most modern Wrestling Games include championship belts, whose holders are persistent between playthroughs. You can generally even put them on the line in multiplayer matches.

General

Arguably the entire concept of Achievements (Xbox 360) or Trophies (PS3) fits this bill, or at least it does as far as an individual game's list goes.

MMORP Gs

Distinct from its New Game+ mode, Kingdom of Loathing has had a few items carry over, such as demon summoning names. There were also some other items that depended on how many other players had, such as a particular familiar.

Platform Game

The entire point of Jesse Venbrux's Deaths is this. Normally its just a platformer with very tricky death traps, however, whenever you play, the server loads up the corpses (blood and all) of all the last 100 players to die on that level. Normally this will just hint at where the hidden death traps are, however, in the last two levels, you have to create a pile of your own bodies in one instance to block one of the traps, and in the other, to create a hill to jump on so that you can get to the goal.

Another of his games, Execution, gives you the option either to shoot a man tied to a post or not. If you shoot him, you lose, and if you load the game up again it says "It's already too late." You get to the guy you're supposed to execute, only he's already dead.

Even worse, deleting everything and reinstalling the game won't bring him back.

Rogue Legacy tasks you with defeating a castle's four guardians to gain access to the Final Boss. However, your character is so weak that this will be nearly impossible. After you inevitably die, your heir will inherit the money you found in the castle, which can be used to build and upgrade training facilities to improve future characters' stats and unlock new classes and equipment, until you are strong enough to beat the game.

Roguelike

When a character dies in NetHack they have a chance of leaving a 'bones' level — a copy of the level exactly as was when they died — to be found by other players. Their corpse is still carrying all of the loot they had in life. But the bones are guarded by the old player's hostile ghost and any surviving pets, and most of the loot is invariably cursed. Also, finding a bones pile is a sure sign that whatever killed your previous character is out there to get you.

Dungeon Crawl features player ghosts as well. Most characters can leave ghosts upon dying - undead, however, cannot. When a ghost is created, it inherits the traits of the character it is based on - for example, a dead summoner will use summoning magic to fight new characters.

Dwarf Fortress generates a "world" with its own history and established locations at the beginning of the game. However, multiple games can be played in the same world, allowing an adventurer to visit fortresses created by the player in earlier games or for settlements to grow, be established, or be wiped out over time. Failed or abandoned fortresses can be reclaimed and recolonized, dead adventurers' possessions can be located and retired adventurers can be encountered and recruited.

In the latest version, if your fortress manages to tame any "exotic" animals, a little bit of the knowledge gained about that species will trickle back to the fort's parent civilization. If you start over again with a new fortress with the same parent civilization, taming that same species will be just that little bit easier.

Over multiple games of Shiren the Wanderer it's possible to improve the towns you visit, which in turn gains you allies and new types of items to find.

One Way Heroics has a Hero Point system that lets you add more perks, unlock more classes, and expand the Dimensional Vault between adventures. More perks and Classes means more replay value and challenge, and the Dimensional Vault lets you transfer items between characters.

Role Playing Game

The tactical RPG Shining Force III had three "scenarios", each with the player controlling a different side of the war. However, the game still read your previous game's save files, allowing for customizable character names to carry over, special events in later scenarios that are unlocked in earlier ones, and even a climactic final battle where the player controls all three armies at once.

Super Robot Wars games will variably let you carry over pilot levels, mech upgrades, money, items, and Favorite Series (allowing you to slowly Favorite every series in the game).

W, at least, will automatically favorite all series on the third playthrough. W also features enemy upgrades to keep some semblance of challenge.

Dawn of Mana lets you keep badges and money earned, bonus stages unlocked, and pets found, as well as allowing access to higher difficulty levels.

Once a class specialization is unlocked in Dragon Age: Origins, it remains unlocked for all subsequent playthroughs.

The DS version of Final Fantasy IV adds Augments. These are special abilities which you can assign to any party member (for example: 50% more HP, fast spellcasting, etc.). Once assigned, the Augment is always available to that party member across playthroughs.

Final Fantasy X: Al Bhed primers are found across the game that let you decode what the Al Bhed are saying, one letter at a time, and as soon as they're found, can be used by any file, so you can finally get what they're saying when you first meet them.

Shoot Em Up

In Battle Garegga, every time the game is played, the rank (shmup lingo for Dynamic Difficulty) at the start of a new game increases. If you're playing it in the arcade in the evening, long after the machine's been on and after (presumably) many plays by other players, this can pose a problem. The only ways to initialize the rank are to reset the machine (or console, if you're in the Saturn version, or emulator, if you're playing on MAME), allow the Attract Demo to run all the way through, or use the Options menu (again, if you're in the Saturn version).

Simulation Game

Happens to some degree in SimCity 4: the residential, commercial and industrial demand in your cities is affected by your neighboring cities.

It goes a bit further than that, and leads to many exploits. You can have one city sell its power, water and landfill space to other cities on the map, but once the city is selling its "goods" you can simply avoid playing that city ever again, and so never have to maintain those service providers. This allows building adjacent cities with no power/water/trash services of their own, which costs a bit more but makes up for it with 0 pollution, 0 space taken up, and no maintenance required.

The Sims is similar in this regard (though not so much in The Sims 3, where switching households within a neighborhood carries a rather arbitrary penalty.)

Partial example in Game Dev Tycoon. As you make video games and develop game reports, you'll gather more information about how genres, audiences, platforms, and other factors interact—for example, you may learn that Sci-Fi/RPG is a good combination. This information will appear when you create further games in your current career, and also in subsequent playthroughs (unless you choose the option to turn this off, so as not to have an unfair advantage). You won't start off a new game with buckets of money, talent, or a shiny new office, but you can start with a load of valuable information about how to tailor your games that a "clean" new game wouldn't have.

Your character level and skills carry over when you restart in Dead Rising. And since the entire game's on a strict time limit, it's difficult to win unless you play for a while just leveling up, then restart and play through with those skills.

Your galaxy in Spore is populated by creatures taken from other player's games. And your game. In fact, a number of in-game achievements require meeting your own creations when they are not under your control.

Other

A Pinball table's jackpot builds up over multiple games. When one player wins it, the jackpot resets to a given default value.

Many pinball games also have an operator setting to make the game dynamically adjust the replay score, which usually awards the player a free game for reaching it. This makes it jump up each time it's won and drop back down gradually if several games go by without it being won. Often, it will also spike very sharply with each win and drop back to normal after the player fails to win it once (for example, to win the nth replay in a row might require earning n times the base replay score), to prevent one player from hogging a table by constantly winning replays.

The main selling point of Risk Legacy is that every game played results in permanent changes to the board and the playing pieces. Continents are named; cities are built and destroyed; territory cards are enriched or destroyed; even new playable factions are unlocked while the starting factions gain new strengths and weaknesses.

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Association (RPGA), which follows a very standardized game sanctioning process so that your character is official no matter what RPGA game table you play at allowing you to play the same character under multiple DMs.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy